Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France

Death and the Enlightenment is an unusual survey of the daily rituals, customs, and attitudes surrounding death and dying in 18th-century France. Focusing on the tension between the faithful and the growing ranks of unbelievers bred on Enlightenment philosophy, McManners charts the course of pestilence and plague, and examines the terrible fears connected with childbirth, disease, disfigurement, mortality, and the hereafter. He also examines suicide, public execution, and the rites surrounding the deathbed, and demonstrates how the period's ever-present concern with death and dying was transformed into the Romantic cult of melancholy that occupied the creative imagination of generations to come.McManners, John is the author of 'Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France', published 1981 under ISBN 9780192818676 and ISBN 0192818678.